The present invention relates to a font information transfer system in a network system constituted by workstations connected through a network and a printer for executing a print job transferred from the workstations, and particularly relates to a font information transfer system for transferring font information to a printer for generating characters with a font in which the line width of strokes is changed from outline data of characters (character frame data: data to approximate outlines of characters to straight or curved lines: basic font data) supplied from a workstation, or a font in which outline shapes of characters are modified in each portion thereof, and for executing a print job of a document including characters with such a font.
Recently, as seen in a DTP (desk top publishing) system, an apparatus has been developed in which a document is made up and edited in a workstation and the made-up document is transferred to a printer so as to be printed with picture quality equivalent to type-printing.
In addition, characters with various fonts used in typography such as type-printing can be used in a workstation.
With such developments, it is expected that requests for printing special fonts made up by individual users will be more numerous.
In order to satisfy such requests, there has been proposed a technique for generating various fonts by making basic font data, that is, standard font data subject to a procedure for modifying font frames or for changing writing shapes (outlines) tracing on the font frames.
In such apparatus, in order to make various characters usable, the above-mentioned outline font to approximate and compress outlines of characters with straight and curved lines (straight/curved lines) is used as a font to freely change the sizes of characters.
Such a conventional technique is disclosed, for example, in Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. Sho. 63-196986.
In the conventional system, an outline font is obtained by calculating approximated straight/curved lines on the basis of coordinates called control points so that transformation processing, for example, such as known "affine transformation" to perform the same transformation upon all coordinates can be performed comparatively easily while keeping high quality of characters. There has been, however, a problem that modification to change stroke width (picture width of Chinese character and so on) or transform outline shape in each portion cannot be executed with high quality.
In addition, if a font generated in a workstation by a user individually is supplied to a printer in the above-mentioned conventional system, documents to be transferred are converted into image data one by one before they are transferred to the printer.
Therefore, the quantity of data to be transferred to the printer becomes large, so that there has been a problem that it takes a long time to print out the data, or that a font made up once cannot be used again, resulting in reduction in operation efficiency of a network as a whole.
In addition, although it can be considered that such fonts are all held as font data, the number of developing processes therefor will be extremely large, and if all the fonts can be developed, it will be almost impossible to make sure of the capacity of a memory for storing all the data.